Near the beginning of this movie-watching experiment, I reviewed Amityville in the Hood without realizing it was a sequel to Amityville Toybox and Amityville Clownhouse. With that knowledge firmly in my back pocket, I will now set out to review the first two installments of the trilogy.
Amityville Toybox is basically a loose remake of The Devil’s Gift (scenes of which later appeared in Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders). A father brings his family together to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. At the party, one of his kids gives him an antique wind-up monkey as a present. Pretty soon, dad goes from being funny and cheerful to cranky and crazed. Little does anyone know the monkey came from the haunted house in Amityville. Before long, dear old dad begins seeing the ghost of his father who urges him to kill his entire family.
This is one of those fake Amityville movies that is set in the mold of the original franchise sequels where an item from the original Amityville house carries the Amityville curse onto another family. As far as these things go, it’s better than you might think. It starts out with a reserved depiction of the real-life DeFeo murders before it segways into a nice little ‘70s inspired opening credits sequence. (There are also scenes of flies buzzing and characters chopping wood, like in the original, and there is an incest subplot that’s kind of like Part 2.)
With the extreme Dutch angles, colorful lighting, incest themes, and scenes of squabbling family members being killed off under the same roof, Amityville Toybox kind of reminded me of a modern-day Andy Milligan movie. Don’t worry, it’s better than that sentence suggests. Mostly. Just don’t be fooled by the title. This isn’t a Demonic Toys kind of thing. There’s only one killer toy, and it really doesn’t do a whole lot once the father gets possessed.
I think this would’ve been a perfectly fine movie had it ended at the hour mark. Unfortunately, it drags needlessly on for another fifteen minutes. The epilogue involving some comic relief paranormal investigators was completely unnecessary and feels like it was only tacked on to get the film to feature length. I could’ve easily done without the gratuitous set-up for the sequel too. Despite those reservations, this is one of the better fake Amityville flicks out there.
AKA: The Amityville Legacy. AKA: Amityville: Legacy.
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